Just a brief apology about the lack of science posts this week. Work has been crazy: on top of trying to catch up on all the class stuff I ignored while I was at the OSA meeting last week, I’ve got all sorts of other things that have come up, including trying to finish a few papers, paying attention to my role on a planning committee for an optics meeting, preparing a grant with colleagues, working on my book, refereeing papers, working on a new review article, supervising student research, and planning a local optics event. It’s safe to say that I’ve been in ‘optics overload’ this week.

As a side note, it really is amazing how quickly this stuff piles up. When I started as a faculty member, I just sat around all day planning my class and doing research by myself. Nice little invitations to help out with projects and join committees started to pop up here and there, and now I’m looking around and realizing that everything needs to get done AT ONCE. I’m not really complaining, ’cause I love to be busy, but it is quite stunning to me.

I’ll be back in the next couple of days with more detailed optics posts. I’ve been ILL’ing a bunch of research papers to get background information, and got permission from APS to explicitly use a figure from one of their PRLs (it’s not too difficult to do, by the way).

Awright, back to working on an inverse scattering problem… hmm… inverse scattering… I feel an ‘optics basics’ post coming on…

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The author of Skulls in the Stars is a professor of physics, specializing in optical science, at UNC Charlotte. The blog covers topics in physics and optics, the history of science, classic pulp fantasy and horror fiction, and the surprising intersections between these areas.